The Mote in God's Eye

The Mote In God's Eye is their acknowledged masterpiece, an epic novel of mankind's first encounter with alien life that transcends the genre. No lesser an authority than Robert A. Heinlein called it "possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read".

Lucifer's Hammer

The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival--a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known....

Time's Eye: A Time Odyssey, Book 1

For eons, Earth has been under observation by the Firstborn, beings almost as old as the universe itself. The Firstborn are unknown to humankind - until they act. In an instant, Earth is carved up and reassembled like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly the planet and every living thing on it no longer exist in a single timeline.

Orbital Decay

The award-winning, bestselling author's first novel. The beamjacks work in zero-gravity constructing satellites in the vacuum of deepest space. And they're not going to let the military control them anymore.

Pushing Ice

2057. Humanity has raised exploiting the solar system to an art form. Bella Lind and the crew of her nuclear-powered ship, the Rockhopper, push ice. They mine comets. And they're good at it. The Rockhopper is nearing the end of its current mission cycle, and everyone is desperate for some much-needed R & R, when startling news arrives from Saturn: Janus, one of Saturn's ice moons, has inexplicably left its natural orbit and is now heading out of the solar system at high speed.

Protector

Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission was to save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before.

Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days, and Brennan figured to meet that ship first.

The Pearl Wars: Skyship Academy, Book 1

A devastated Earth's last hope is found in Pearls: small, mysterious orbs that fall from space and are capable of supplying enough energy to power entire cities. Battling to control the Pearls are the Skyship dwellers -political dissidents who live in massive ships in the Earth's stratosphere - and the corrupt Surface government.

Kris Hutchison says:"This is definitely a book one of a series but it is interesting"

Starhawk: Priscilla Hutchins, Book 1

Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins has finally realized her lifelong dream: She’s completed a nerve-bending qualification flight for a pilot’s license. Her timing is far from optimal, however. Faster-than-light travel has only recently become a reality, and the World Space Authority is still learning how to manage long-range missions safely. To make matters worse, efforts to prepare two planets for colonization are killing off native life-forms, outraging people on Earth.So there’s not a lot of demand for space pilots.

Crashlander

Crashlander Beowulf Shaeffer has long been one of the most popular characters in Known Space. Now, for the first time ever, Larry Niven brings together all the Beowulf Shaeffer stories - including a brand-new one - in one long tale of exploration and adventure! Plus - an all-new framing story that pulls together all of Beowulf Shaeffer's adventures and allows Shaeffer and his family to make a clean start at life once and for all!

Ringworld

Welcome to Ringworld, an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets. The gravitational force created by a rotation on its axis of 770 miles per second means no need for a roof. Walls 1,000 miles high at each rim will let in the sun and prevent much air from escaping. Larry Niven's novel, Ringworld, is the winner of the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1970 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1972 Ditmars, an Australian award for Best International Science Fiction.

The Smoke Ring: The State Series, Book 3

In the free-fall environment of the Smoke Ring, descendants of the crew of the Discipline no longer remember their Earth roots or the existence of Sharls Davis Kendy, the computer-program despot of the ship - until Kendy initiates contact once more. Fourteen years later, only Jeffer, the Citizens Tree Scientist, knows that Kendy is still watching and waiting. Then, when the Citizens Tree people rescue a family of loggers, they learn for the first time of the Admiralty, a large society living in free fall amid the floating debris called the Clump.

A hero without peer or scruples, Sam Gunn has a nose for trouble, money, and women, though not necessarily in that order. A man with the ego (and stature) of a Napoleon, the business acumen of a P. T. Barnum, and the raging hormones of a teenage boy, Sam is the finest astronaut NASA ever trained and dumped. But more than money, more than women, Sam Gunn loves justice—and he really does love money and women.

World of Ptavvs

A reflective statue is found at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, having lain there for 1.5 billion years. Since humans have recently developed a time-slowing field and found that one such field cannot function within another, it is suspected that the "Sea Statue" is actually a space traveler within one of these time fields. Larry Greenberg, a telepath, agrees to participate in an experiment: a time-slowing field is generated around both Greenberg and the statue, shutting off the stasis field and revealing Kzanol.

Homeward Bound

With his epic novels of alternate history, Harry Turtledove shares a stunning vision of what might have been - and what might still be - if one moment in history were changed. In the Worldwar and Colonization series, an ancient, highly advanced alien species found itself locked in a bitter struggle with a distant, rebellious planet: Earth. For those defending the Earth, this all-out war for survival supercharged human technology, made friends of foes, and turned allies into bitter enemies.

Rigg is well trained at keeping secrets. Only his father knows the truth about Rigg’s strange talent for seeing the paths of people’s pasts. But when his father dies, Rigg is stunned to learn just how many secrets Father had kept from him - secrets about Rigg’s own past, his identity, and his destiny. And when Rigg discovers that he has the power not only to see the past, but also to change it, his future suddenly becomes anything but certain.

The Last Ship: A Novel

The unimaginable has happened: the world has been plunged into all-out nuclear war. Sailing near the Arctic Circle, the USS Nathan James is relatively unscathed, but the future is grim and Captain Thomas is facing mutiny from the tattered remnants of his crew. With civilization in ruins, he urges those that remain - 152 men and 26 women - to pull together in search of land. Once they reach safety, however, the men and women on board realize that they are the earth's last remaining survivors.

Flatlander

Gil 'The Arm' Hamilton was one of the top operatives of ARM, the elite UN police force. His intuition was unfailingly accurate, his detective skills second to none, and his psychic powers - esper sense and telekinesis - were awesome.

Now you can hear all the classic stories of the legendary ARM operative, collected in one volume for the first time - plus, an all-new, never-before-published Gil Hamilton adventure!

A Gift from Earth

Plateau, a colony in the Tau Ceti system, was settled by humans some 300 years before the plot begins. The colony world itself is a Venusian type planet with a dense, hot, poisonous atmosphere. It would be otherwise uninhabitable, except for a tall monolithic mesa that rises 40 miles up into a breathable layer in the upper atmosphere. This gives the planet a habitable area about half the size of California.

Steel World: Undying Mercenaries, Book 1

In the 20th century Earth sent probes, transmissions, and welcoming messages to the stars. Unfortunately, someone noticed. The Galactics arrived with their battle fleet in 2052. Rather than being exterminated under a barrage of hell-burners, Earth joined their vast Empire. Swearing allegiance to our distant alien overlords wasn't the only requirement for survival. We also had to have something of value to trade, something that neighboring planets would pay their hard-earned credits to buy. As most of the local worlds were too civilized to have a proper army, the only valuable service Earth could provide came in the form of soldiers....

Area 51

Deep in the Nevada desert is the most secure compound in the United States: Area 51. The most chilling experiment of all time is about to begin there. The president doesn't know about it. Just a few scientists and military personnel working for Majestic-12 do, and they are about to make a very big mistake.

Earth Strike: Star Carrier, Book One

There is a milestone in the evolution of every sentient race, a Tech Singularity Event, when the species achieves transcendence through its technological advances. Now the creatures known as humans are near this momentous turning point. But an armed threat is approaching from deepest space, determined to prevent humankind from crossing over that boundary - by total annihilation if necessary.

Fleet of Worlds: 200 Years Before the Discovery of the Ringworld

Fleet of Worlds takes a closer look at Human-Puppeteer (Citizen) relations and the events leading up to Niven's first Ringworld novel. Kirsten Quinn-Kovacks is among the best and brightest of her people. She gratefully serves the gentle race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship, gave them a world, and nurtures them still. If only the Citizens knew where Kirsten's people came from.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets.

Time for the Stars

Travel to other planets is now a reality, and with overpopulation stretching the resources of Earth, the necessity of finding habitable worlds is growing ever more urgent. There’s a problem though—because the spaceships are slower than light, any communication between the exploring ships and Earth would take years.

Tom and Pat are identical twin teenagers. As twins they’ve always been close, so close that it seemed like they could read each other’s minds.

Publisher's Summary

After more than two hundred years as a corpsicle, Jaybee Corbell awoke in someone else’s body and under threat of instant annihilation if he made a wrong move while they were training him for a one-way mission to the stars.

But Corbell bided his time and made his own move. Once he was outbound, where the society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core, where the unimaginable energies of the universe wrenched the fabric of time and space and promised final escape from his captors.

Then he returned to an Earth eons older than the one he’d left, a planet that had had three million years to develop perils he had never dreamed of - perils that became nightmares that he had to escape... somehow.

Larry Niven is the multiple Hugo and Nebula award–winning author of the Ringworld series, as well as many other science fiction masterpieces. His Beowulf’s Children, coauthored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times best seller. He lives in Chatsworth, California.

What the Critics Say

“This fantastic novel is a mix of Niven hard science and a time-travel concept to boggle the mind.…Even after the last line the feeling remains of the story still rushing on into the magic distance of the universe.” (A. E. van Vogt, winner of the SFWA Grand Master Award)

“Niven rams this fantastic tale at the reader with taut authority, mixing hard science with mind-boggling concepts of time and space to give us a whole new kind of trip.” (Publishers Weekly)

“Niven’s intoxicating concepts, ideas, scientific extrapolations, and exotic hardware bubble up from every page. Rich in imagination and astonishing in breadth…Will challenge the most sophisticated readers.” (Booklist)

The first chapter of this book was a short story called Rammer. It was an excellent story and I would give 5 stars to it alone.

The rest of the book deviates from the first chapter in content, style and imagination. Niven has a great imagination as demonstrated in his books, Ringworld, Protector, The Integral Trees and Limits. The second half of this book sounds as if it was written by Philip Jose Farmer.

The question: Do you know how people get old? is asked a couple of times. For me it was listening to the second half of this book.

A better narrator would have gotten it to at least a 3 star review. I don't think there is anything that could have me commit to a 4 star or higher though.

Would you recommend A World Out of Time to your friends? Why or why not?

It depends on the friend. If it were a friend that enjoys wildly imaginative worlds and characters and philosophies, I probably would recommend this one. A friend that enjoys a more structured story with character depth I would advise to skip it.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

He had a repetitive tone. I have listened to narrators before that had inflection and feeling to their reading based on the situation. I never found that here. It even took me out of the story sometimes as I was listening to the same sentence pattern after same sentence pattern. I would just listen to the da da da da daaa. It varied of course based on sentence length obviously, but was clearly evident.

I should clarify that it wasn't horrible. I have listened to many worse narrators. It was just monotonous for long stretches which is not suitable to my attention span.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Sadly, no reaction.

Any additional comments?

This was my 2nd Niven book; my 1st being Ringworld. If you are a fan of the Larry Niven style and imagination I do think you will enjoy this book regardless of narration. Had I not known it was the same author as Ringworld, I would have noticed the similarity in styles. That said, however, Ringworld was a much better book and while it may not be fair to compare this book to one as acclaimed as that, you should at least be cognizant so as to have lessened expectations.

This is my third Niven book and I just can't get enough. My favorite book so far as been Ringworld but I also found this one to be very interesting. It involves plenty of space travel, some AI, and plenty of dystopia. I loved how the novel technically takes place over a huge time period because the main character goes into cryo so often. This book encompasses so many theories of how the world could go in the future: What if girls ruled the sky and boys ruled the earth? What if adults were just used to make children? What if there was immortality? What if you could move planets? Plus there's a whole Les Mis kinda part where a government official is obsessed with bringing to justice the main character. Lots of action and plenty of interesting science.

I actually loved that this wasn't just a time travel book. There is a good chunk of it that takes place in interstellar space. That learning is done by memory shots. That even in millions of years cars will still be an accepted form of transportation. I love Peerssa for some reason. I love the cat tails. I loved that despite this book being written in the 70s, it is still a brilliant piece of fiction.

What other book might you compare A World Out of Time to and why?

I have only listened to 3 other time travel books, "The Time Travelers Wife", and "Times Eye", both of which are nothing like this book. If I had to make a comparison to anything, it would be the Blockbuster movie, "The Time Machine".

What about Tom Weiner’s performance did you like?

Everything, every voice was distinct and separate. Mirelly-Lyra even had that old crony sound. Tom was awesome!

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I didn't laugh or cry but I had an acute interest in getting to the next chapter.

Any additional comments?

Got to ask yourself...would you ever take a one way trip 3 million years into the future?

The scope of the story is immense. Some really thought provoking ideas presented by Larry Niven. Method of population growth control in a world of immortals most of all. A ton of grand ideas, but sadly I felt disconnected from the story the whole time. Like I was an observer the whole time. An intellectual experience more than a literary one.

I first read this book as a teenager in the 70s. Some books and/or characters stick with you, and this far-ranging story has been one that has come to mind often over the years. The audiobook was a nice journey down memory lane. I enjoyed every minute.